This site focuses on these questions


Sept 13: WHITE-TAILED TROPICBIRD found in CT on Aug 28th! Read this fascinating story at Greg's site....

SEPT 10: CURRENTLY WORKING WITH THE eBIRD TEAM TO GET ALL HURRICANE BIRDS INTO eBIRD. PLEASE ENTER YOUR STORM-BIRDS INTO eBIRD THIS WEEK, OR CONTACT ME (robben99@gmail.com) OR MARSHALL ILIFF TO ASSIST.

This Hurricane Irene blog was meant to be helpful for just ONE WEEK to provide REAL-TIME reporting of ALL Atlantic coast storm-birds DURING the "teeth" of the storm, but the storm's winds and flooding killed our electricity and this blog. Without electricity, water and internet for 102 hours prevented us reporting during the most exciting part of the hurricane and its birding aftermath.
Instead of trying to "catch-up" and reconstruct those 102 missing hours from the archived listserv reports, we will instead 1) summarize them, 2) learn what we can from this "experiment" in real-time-hurricane-bird-blogging, 3) request eBird data entry of all hurricane reports, and 4) get ready for the NEXT hurricane this year!

Therefore we will refocus on the latest current map of the NEXT hurricanes and their projected storm tracks.....
Tropical Storms and Hurricanes (and the wind speed probabilities map... Wind Speed Projections ) and prepare again to answer these questions....
What impacts will the next hurricane have on birds on the East Coast of the USA (plus the western Atlantic and maritime Canada)? And how will that be reflected on the twenty main internet bird lists covering that region?

Friday, September 2, 2011

Copying the archived hurricane bird reports from each state

Since this blog lost its primary goal to be a real-time communications tool DURING the middle of Hurricane Irene (because we lost electricity Sunday morning)  a revised goal for this blog will be to assemble all the Hurricane Irene bird-list field reports together here, for convenience and to prevent any of them from being lost, across all or most of the states Irene touched.

Unless anybody has any objection, several long pages in this blog will copy the exact archived bird list posts covering the Hurricane Irene week, from about 8/26 through 9/2.
The CTbirds archives are the first being experimented with, and you can easily see their work-in-progress by clicking on these links (they are simply long posts in this blog, and artificially stored under the date of 8/22)....

Hurricane Irene 2011 (and its birds): Experimenting with the full text from CT birds list from 8/22-8/28
this long page covers 8/22 through 8/28

Hurricane Irene 2011 (and its birds): Experimenting with the full text from CT birds list from 8/29
and this long page covers 8/29 onwards

You can always return to this blog's "home page" by clicking on the name of the blog at the very top of the screen. These long archived sections are so long that they cannot all fit on one screen, so scrolling down is not enough for you to find all the long pages (actually long posts) which will be coming here. You will have to use the TableOfContents on the right side (all listed artificially within August 22) or click on OlderPosts when you see that at the bottom of your scrolling.

Note that yellow and green background colors are being used to high-light different field reports (using two colors makes it easier on the eye to distinguish two close reports). Red will also be used to flag some key species within these reports. This work has just begun, and is currently incomplete. Extraneous posts which are not related to the hurricane will probably be deleted at the end of this process, which will shorten these long pages.

The goal is simply to capture the full text of all the storm posts for convenient review by birders (and perhaps for scientists and others to possibly use in the future to study Hurricane Irene and its birding consequences).  In some sense these posts are the first raw field reports, and have a value of their own, although your bird reports should ALSO be input to at least two other organizations....

1.  eBird
AND
2.  your state avian records committee (if the bird species is that level of rarity)

Suggestions welcomed.
The next step this weekend is to search for the same kinds of archives from the other Atlantic coastal states.

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